Gary Bacon spotted a Web designer job posting online several months ago and shot an email to a recruiter at Medifast Inc. That was just the beginning. Bacon connected with a recruiter, Caitlin Goldstein, and the conversation moved to Twitter. They tweeted back and forth, and Goldstein got to know Bacon, found links to examples of his work and felt confident enough to invite him to an interview. Welcome to the new world of recruiting, which has expanded into social media. A few years...

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines on Friday arrested an Australian national with suspected links to foreign Islamist militants after he urged Philippine Muslims on social media sites to support conflicts in Iraq and Syria, recruiting them to go to the Middle East. The arrest is the first known link between Islamist militants in the Southeast Asian nation and foreign jihadists supporting conflicts in the Middle East. The Australian government believes at least...

Trib Nation asked social media manager Amy Guth a few questions about a growing connection many digital readers have with us via social media. Explain social media in three sentences: I learned an important lesson about social media from my grandfather. When describing my current job to him, he pointed out that our digital conversations were a return to the person-to-person way of doing business. He realized what I initially didn't: That the digital platform is new, but the model...

Does digital data offer indicators that can be used to monitor marketing effectiveness and predict box office success even before awareness turns into intent? We analyzed this weekend's new movies across Facebook , YouTube , Twitter and Google (the methodology behind the numbers is laid out in the appendix below) over the seven days leading up to their release, when marketing campaigns should be at their peak. " Dawn of...

(Reuters) - Shares of social media giant Facebook Inc, which bungled its initial public offering in May, have been under the gun ever since, hitting a nadir on Friday after dismal inaugural results. While the earnings have cast a chill over Facebook shares, which have already lost 38 percent of their value from their $38 debut price, not every social media stock has been tarred with the same brush. Facebook shares on Friday dropped 11.7 percent to $23.71 while LinkedIn Corp shares rose 2.6 percent...

Barbie has a LinkedIn page . Now can we get her some hips? She has 4,932 followers (as of Friday morning) and more than 150 careers under her teeny-tiny patent leather belt, all showcased on her 20-page resume. Her latest job is fake consultant to a fake business called Dream Incubator, "helping girls around the world play out their imagination, try on different careers and explore the world around them. " She's evolving and growing in every area - except...

Every edition of the Chicago Tribune is packed with journalism, from the breaking news you need to know now, to the columnists you love to read. But the stories we tell extend well beyond the printed page. We're big believers in social media, and we want to make sure you know about all our offerings and how to interact with us. Here's a quick glance. Twitter Follow @chicagotribune for the latest headlines and other powerful stories. Follow @coloneltribune for a more gentlemanly version of...

Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, a photo of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion was mistaken for fireworks and posted to American Apparel's Tumblr. Ouch. That's bad. But then came the company apology. "The image was re-blogged in error by one of our international social media employees who was born after the tragedy and was unaware of the event. We sincerely regret the insensitivity of that selection and the post has been deleted. " Ouch. That might actually be worse.

WASHINGTON -- In the Newtown massacre, as in all such tragic events in a free and open society, both the news and social media went all-out to provide the fullest coverage of what happened and why. The latter is not yet fully known. In too many instances, though, the legitimate quest for the truth was accompanied by abuse. The hordes of print, radio and television reporters who descended on the grieving suburban Connecticut town generally pursued their grim business with due respect for the...

Nash Grier , a teenager known for having the most followers on the social media app Vine , went even more viral recently -- but this time for making a controversial statement in one of his videos. The 16-year-old, who has 8.7 million Vine followers, posted a clip from a HIV-testing commercial that explained that the disease was not just a "gay thing. " Grier then appears on the video saying, "Yes it is!" and screamed a homophobic slur. This is not the first time...

Social media has rapidly become an essential tool in the world. Sure, Facebook might be a good place to look at pictures of your friends engaged in drunken, weekend antics and you can quickly tell people about how hungry you are on Twitter, LinkedIn has established itself as the platform where business professionals can powerfully extend their brands. One man in the Chicagoland area knows LinkedIn better than anyone: J.D. Gershbein. When you think of an owl, what pops into your head?

SANLIURFA Turkey (Reuters) - When truck driver Vehbi Demir was handcuffed by masked Islamists wielding machine guns and driven to an unknown destination, he little imagined he would end up sympathizing with the militants' cause. Demir was among 32 Turkish truck drivers seized by fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last month, as the Sunni insurgents seized territory in an offensive that threatens to break up the...

Witnessing friends' vacations, love lives and work successes on Facebook can cause envy and trigger feelings of misery and loneliness, according to German researchers. A study conducted jointly by two German universities found rampant envy on Facebook, the world's largest social network that has more than 1 billion users and has produced an unprecedented platform for social comparison. The researchers found that one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more...

MIAMI (Reuters) - Two South Florida public defenders were fired Tuesday after making inflammatory remarks on social media about Palestinians allegedly celebrating the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June. In one Facebook post attorney Gary Sheres wrote: "they are the filthy swine they don't eat," referring to the Muslim custom of not eating pork. "That's why the Palestinian people are considered the cockroaches of the world," lawyer...

The Sports Xchange MLB Team Report - Toronto Blue Jays - INSIDE PITCH Jose Bautista had a sports hernia in 2010 that required surgery in the offseason. The Blue Jays' right fielder, and sometimes third baseman, played through it and hit 54 home runs in a breakout season that year. He has nothing to prove when it comes to showing that he can and has played through pain. That is what makes it sickening that some Toronto fans for want of a better name, hiding behind social media,...

JAKARTA (Reuters) - The front-runner in Wednesday's Indonesian presidential election has flown to Mecca on a whirlwind pilgrimage in a last-ditch bid to win voters among the world's largest Muslim population and put to rest damaging suggestions that he is really a Christian. Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has seen his huge early lead in polls narrow sharply in what has become Indonesia's dirtiest and tightest presidential race in the face of a sharp and well-financed campaign...

The best advice for using social media effectively is the advice that makes us go, "Hey, that makes sense! I get it!" or, is advice that leads to our "a-ha" moments. The advice that lead to my own "a-ha" with social media didn't so much change what I was doing as it sharpened my focus. The advice was this: "Instead of answering the question, 'what are you doing?,' answer the question, 'what has your attention?'" The advice came from an August 2008 blog post, "50 ideas on using Twitter for...

SiriusXM has fired Anthony Cumia, one-half of the longtime radio program "Opie and Anthony," over racially-charged comments he made earlier in the week. Cumia, who was also fired from a Boston station in 1998 for falsely reporting the death of the city's mayor, called a black woman a "pig" and "an animal" on Twitter after she allegedly punched him in the face for trying to take a photo. He then said several black men came to her defense. "There's a deep seeded...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc unveiled on Wednesday a new software suite that reflects the company's aggressive push into fields like marketing and human resources as it battles heightened competition from rivals. CEO and founder Marc Benioff announced the new products at the company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, promising to bring about a "social revolution" to how large companies use software to manage their business. One of Salesforce's new...

Dear Amy: My mother has been using Facebook more frequently in the last few months, and I think that's fine. Unfortunately the majority of the pictures that she posts are of me. Her profile and cover photos are of me. I am not her "friend" on Facebook, but if I look up her name I can see dozens of photos of me all over her page. I really don't want her plastering my picture everywhere, especially if her privacy settings are weak and anyone has access to the photos. My...